Extracting the Proverbial Bedrock of Society: A Report Precolumbian Maya Granitic Rock Quarries in the Mountain Pine Ride, Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Ground Stone Studies in the Eastern Maya Lowlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Sourcing studies have consistently pointed to the plutons of the Mountain Pine Ridge (MPR), Belize, as the preferred source of granitic rock for making ground stone objects used by precolumbian Maya communities throughout the eastern lowlands. Nonetheless, questions about how the raw material was extracted remain unanswered. Were eroded nodules collected from the many stream beds flowing off the MPR, or was it quarried directly from outcrops? How was the work organized and who did it? In this paper, we report on precolumbian Maya granitic rock quarry sites in the MPR, the first ever recorded in the Maya area. Our studies reveal Maya people were quarrying raw material directly from outcrops and shaping preforms for a variety of objects in the immediate environs of the extraction sites. In this paper, we discuss the range of quarry types present so far recorded in the MPR, the tool assemblages used for extraction and preform creation at them, and we weigh our current evidence that local communities were working the sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Recent Advances in Ground Stone Studies in the Eastern Maya Lowlands   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36175.0